
(lass SJl¥2h 






Book 



A 



foipghtft . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



, 



Jhtgetgoll Hectares* on Smmcrtalttg 



Immortality and the New Theodicy. By 
George A. Gordon. 1896. 

Human Immortality. Two supposed Objections 
to the Doctrine. By William James. 1897. 

Dionysos and Immortality: The Greek Faith 
in Immortality as affected by the rise of Indiv- 
idualism. By Benjamin Ide Wheeler. 1898. 

The Conception of Immortality. By Josiah 
Royce. 1899. 

Life Everlasting. By John Fiske. 1900. 

Science and Immortality. By William Osier. 

1904. 
The Endless Life. By Samuel M. Crothers. 

1905. 
Individuality and Immortality. By Wilhelm 

Ostwald. 1906. 

The Hope of Immortality. By Charles F. 
Dole. 1907. 

Buddhism and Immortality. By William S. 
Bigelow. 1908. 

Is Immortality Desirable? By G. Lowes 
Dickinson. 1909. 

Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality. By 
George A. Reisner. 1911. 

Intimations of Immortality in the Sonnets 
of Shakespeare. By George H. Palmer. 
1912. 

Metempsychosis. By George Foot Moore. 
1914. 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 



Zbc Ungeraoll Xecture, X914 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 



BY 



GEORGE FOOT MOORE, D.D., LL.D. 

Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion 
in Harvard University 




CAMBRIDGE 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1914 



-09 






COPYRIGHT, 1914 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 



OCT 19 1914 

'CU387280 



THE INGERSOLL LECTURESHIP 

Extract from the will of Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll, who died in 
Keene, County of Cheshire, New Hampshire, Jan. 26, 18 q 3 

First. In carrying out the wishes of my late beloved 
father, George Goldthwait Ingersoll, as declared by him 
in his last will and testament, I give and bequeath to 
Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., where my 
late father was graduated, and which he always held in 
love and honor, the sum of Five thousand dollars 
($5,000) as a fund for the establishment of a Lectureship 
on a plan somewhat similar to that of the Dudleian 
lecture, that is — one lecture to be delivered each year, 
on any convenient day between the last day of May and 
the first day of December, on this subject, " the Im- 
mortality of Man," said lecture not to form a part of 
the usual college course, nor to be delivered by any 
Professor or Tutor as part of his usual routine of in- 
struction, though any such Professor or Tutor may be 
appointed to such service. The choice of said lecturer 
is not to be limited to any one religious denomination, 
nor to any one profession, but may be that of either 
clergyman or layman, the appointment to take place at 
least six months before the delivery of said lecture. 
The above sum to be safely invested and three fourths 
of the annual interest thereof to be paid to the lecturer 
for his services and the remaining fourth to be expended 
in the publishment and gratuitous distribution of the 
lecture, a copy of which is always to be furnished by 
the lecturer for such purpose. The same lecture to be 
named and known as " the Ingersoll lecture on the 
Immortality of Man." 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 1 

THE belief that man somehow sur- 
vives death is universal. To the 
untutored mind death is not the 
cessation of a delicately balanced system 
of bio-chemical functions, but the de- 
parture from the body of something real 
and substantial, the living, breathing, 
speaking, moving part of man — the 
soul. Dreams, in which the dead appear 
in form and act like their living selves, 
give greater distinctness to the imagi- 
nation : the soul is a vaporous double of 
the body, usually invisible, but capable 
of sensible manifestation and even — as 
in nightmare — of energetic materializa- 
tion. 

The souls of the dead haunt their for- 
mer abodes; their kinsmen set out food 
and drink for them, without which even 



2 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

ghosts starve; tombs are built and fur- 
nished for their habitation. Or the dead 
are imagined to be gathered in the caver- 
nous recesses of the earth as in a vast 
common tomb; they migrate to unfre- 
quented regions beyond the mountains 
or over the seas, where they lead a life 
like that on earth, but exempt from all 
its evils; or they ascend the sky and 
dwell in the sun and the moon. Diverse, 
and to our thinking contradictory, no- 
tions often exist side by side without 
conflict; sometimes they are harmonized 
by the belief, not uncommon among 
savages, that man has more than one 
kind of soul. 

The social distinctions of this world 
are carried over into the other. Chiefs, 
heroes, priests, by virtue of their divine 
origin, or in requital of their great deeds, 
or through their potent magic, are trans- 
lated to Elysian fields or admitted to the 
company of the gods, while the common 




METEMPSYCHOSIS 3 

herd crowd the murky realms of Hades. 
Moral distinctions, also, come by de- 
grees. The abominably wicked are 
hurled into nether darkness, the emi- 
nently good are given a place in heaven. 
Finally, retribution becomes universal: 
every soul receives its deserts, whether 
good or bad. The first conception, like 
the beginning of earthly justice, is re- 
taliation — man suffers what he has 
made another suffer — and this poetical 
justice contributes reality and variety to 
all the infernos of later imagination. 

Besides the question, What becomes of 
the soul after death ? men early asked 
its counterpart, Whence comes the soul 
of a living man ? It is universally as- 
sumed that it comes from without, and 
enters the body of the infant at birth or 
the embryo at quickening; and the belief 
is very wide-spread that the souls of 
deceased ancestors or kinsmen are so 
re-embodied. Family likeness in feature 



4 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

and disposition is thus accounted for; 
and methods of more particular identifi- 
cation are sometimes practised, by which 
the child's name is ascertained. 

Savages, knowing no difference in 
kind between themselves and other ani- 
mals, of whose superiority in strength or 
cunning they have frequent experience, 
and whose mysterious and uncanny 
powers seem a kind of magic, attribute 
to them souls like their own, and it is 
generally believed that the soul of a man 
may be reborn in a beast and conversely. 
Tales of were- wolves fill a large room in 
folklore; transformations by witchcraft, 
and the power of sorcerers to extract the 
soul of a living man and ban it in a tree 
or animal, are common. The premises of 
the transmigration of souls are thus 
found in savage psychology all the world 
over. 

Into this circle of ideas, also, retalia- 
tion, the rudimentary form of justice, 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 5 

enters. The soul of a man who has done 
heinous wrongs to his fellows in this life 
will be born in another life to be the vic- 
tim of like evils. Or the embodiment of 
the soul corresponds to the character it 
displayed in its former existence. Thus, 
to take examples at random from the 
Law-book of Manu : 2 Men who delight in 
doing hurt become beasts of prey; those 
who eat forbidden food become worms; 
for stealing meat man is born as a vul- 
ture; for stealing grain he becomes a rat; 
for stealing perfumes, a musk-rat; and 
so on. He who unlawfully kills an ani- 
mal will in future births suffer as many 
violent deaths as the slain beast had 
hairs. 3 Defects and deformities are of 
similar origin: " In consequence of a 
remainder of guilt, are born idiots, 
blind, deaf, and deformed men, all of 
whom are despised by the virtuous.' ' 4 
Plato has the same doctrine: cowards 
and unjust men will be born again as 



6 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

women; gluttons, drunkards, and wan- 
tons become asses; the violent become 
wolves or hawks. 5 

The re-embodiment of souls, thus be- 
come retributive, may be superimposed 
on retribution in another world, a sojourn 
in heaven or hell intervening between 
two successive lives on earth. This com- 
bination was made, as we shall see, both 
in the East and the West. 

II 

In India and among the Greeks me- 
tempsychosis was not only a popular 
belief and a religious doctrine, but it was 
taken up into philosophy and meta- 
physics. An exposition of these classical 
systems will show what great possibilities 
there were in the idea. 

In the older Brahmanic scriptures 
there is no distinct reference to metem- 
psychosis. The hymns of the Rig- Veda 
know of the blessedness of the good in 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 7 

the heaven of the gods, while the fate of 
the wicked is less frequently and less 
explicitly alluded to — they are thrust 
down to " that deep place/' into un- 
fathomable darkness. Later texts are 
less reticent; in the torments of hell the 
Indian — especially the sectarian — im- 
agination has achieved unsurpassed hor- 
rors. 

In the Upanishads the re-embodiment 
of the soul to another life on earth is 
introduced as a solemn mystery. The 
novelty and the mystery do not He in the 
idea itself, which, as we have seen, is a 
common savage notion, and is doubtless 
far older in India than philosophical 
thinking, but in the law of reincarna- 
tion which reflection discovers. In pas- 
sages which are among the oldest in the 
Upanishads and the most profound, 6 it 
is not merely the fortunes of men that 
are determined by their previous exist- 
ence, but their character. When Ya- 



8 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

jfiavalkya and Artabhaga go out alone 
to talk of the secret that fills them with 
awe, " their discourse was of deeds (Kar- 
ma), 7 and what they praised was deeds; 
verily, a man becomes good by good 
deeds, evil by evil." In another conver- 
sation, after speaking of the transit from 
one lif e to another in the world of men or 
of gods, Yajnavalkya says: " As a man 
consists of this or that, as he acts, as he 
lives, so will he be born. He who did 
what was good will be born as a good 
man; he who did evil, as a bad man. He 
becomes holy by holy works, wicked by 
wicked. Therefore it is said, l Man is 
altogether fashioned of desire; as his 
desire is, so is his insight; as his insight, 
so are his deeds; according to his deeds, 
so is his destiny. ' " 8 

In this passage — in which, it may be 
noted, only human births are contem- 
plated — re-embodiment appears to fol- 
low at once on death: 9 " As the cater- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 9 

pillar, when it has reached the tip of a 
leaf, lays hold of another and draws itself 
over to it, so the soul, after it has cast off 
the body and [temporarily] abandoned 
ignorance, lays hold of another begin- 
ning and draws itself over to it." 10 But 
the belief in heaven and hell was already 
firmly fixed, and in the general concep- 
tion the soul at death goes to heaven or 
hell and there remains until its merit is 
exhausted or its ill-desert expiated, 
when it returns to earth to enter a new 
body. 

In other Upanishads, as in Manu, the 
principle that what a man sows in one 
life he shall reap in another determines 
the rank and condition in which a man 
is born: " Those who here lead a good 
life may look forward to being honor- 
ably born of a Brahman mother, or a 
Kshatriya, or a Vaicya (i. e. y in one of the 
three high castes) ; while those who have 
led a vile life may expect to enter the 



io METEMPSYCHOSIS 

womb of a bitch, or a sow, or a Candala" 
(a creature having the semblance of 
man, but in reality beneath the level of 
an unclean beast). 11 

Man's destiny is not solely deter- 
mined by his conduct; knowledge also 
counts. When the departed soul on its 
way comes to the moon, where is the 
entrance to the heavenly world, it is ex- 
amined on its knowledge; if it fails, "it 
is rained down to earth to be born again 
as a worm, or a fly, or a fish, or a bird, 
as a lion, a boar, a tiger, a man, or some 
other creature, in this place or in that 
— each according to his works, each ac- 
cording to his knowledge.' ' 12 

The lot of man from existence to 
existence is thus fixed by his deeds, his 
Karma. It is not appointed for him in 
conformity with his desert by the sen- 
tence of a just judge, but is determined 
by the inexorable law of cause and effect. 
Every act, every thought, has its inevi- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS n 

table consequence in this life or another, 
and that consequence may in its turn 
become a cause. All that men have else- 
where attributed to divine justice or 
inscrutable providence, to fate or chance, 
is in India the fruit of the deed. To this 
law, which is the causal nexus of the 
universe itself, men and beasts, gods and 
demons, are alike subject. Good deeds, 
no less than evil, have their consequences, 
and equally entail another existence. 
From eternity to eternity all souls are 
thus bound upon a revolving wheel 
more terrible than the fate of Ixion — 
the round of rebirth. 

From the moment when this idea took 
possession of men's minds, the problem 
of philosophy was to find what it is that 
holds the soul fast in this round, and 
how its bonds may be broken; and men 
began to demand of religion, not that it 
should get from the gods the good things 
of this life and the promise of a future 



12 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

abode in heaven, but that it should as- 
sure them of deliverance from the law of 
transmigration. 

For the thinkers, the great evil was 
not the sufferings of the mortal life and 
the dread of death in endlessly repeated 
existences. The loathing of life which 
was methodically cultivated in Bud- 
dhism, for example, does not appear in 
the earlier Upanishads, nor is their 
tone prevailingly pessimistic. 13 The evil 
is that in this life the soul is estranged 
from its origin and its true destiny. 

For the soul, the true self of man, is 
not a part of what we call " nature, " 
with its incessant change; it is of an- 
other order of being, essentially eternal 
and unchanging. The great discovery of 
the Upanishads, the truth of which the 
teachers speak with bated breath, is that 
the soul in man is identical with the All- 
Soul, the one reality in the universe, the 
Absolute of which naught can be said 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 13 

save, "It is not this, not that." 14 As a 
modern interpreter expresses it: " The 
Brahman, the power which presents it- 
self to us embodied in all beings, which 
brings into existence all worlds, supports 
and maintains them, and again re- 
absorbs them into itself — this eternal, 
infinite, divine power is identical with 
the Atman, with what, after stripping 
off all that is external, we find in our- 
selves as our inmost and true being, our 
real self, the soul." The pregnant for- 
mula for this identity is found in the 
great word, " That art thou! " 

Ignorance of this unity and identity — 
an ignorance which is not negative but 
positive, a false knowledge — is the 
fons et origo malorum; it is this ignorance 
that binds man to the wheel of rebirth. 
In the transcendental knowledge of iden- 
tity is dispelled the illusion of finite 
individuality, and with it the might of 
" Deed " is destroyed, the soul is forever 



14 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

set free — "It cometh not again. ' ' Nor is 
it only after death that this eternal life 
begins: " He who is without desire, free 
from desire, his desire attained, whose 
desire is set on Self (Atman), his vital 
breath does not pass out, but Brahman 
he is, and in Brahman he is absorbed. 
As the verse says, 

1 When all the passion is at rest 
That lurks within the heart of man, 
Then is the mortal no more mortal, 
But here and now attaineth Brahman.' 

As a serpent's skin, dead and cast off, 
lies on an ant hill, so lies this body then; 
but the bodiless, the immortal, the life is 
pure Brahman, is pure light." 15 

When this monism is consistently 
thought through in the classical Vedanta, 
what we call the phenomenal world is as 
unreal as the empirical Ego; both are 
projections of the cosmic illusion, Maya. 
In other schools the philosophy takes a 
more pantheistic turn, with the exist- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 15 

ence of individual souls in God; and 
it finally accommodates itself to Hindu 
theism, in which the grace of God de- 
livers from the round of rebirth those 
who turn to him in faith and love, and 
takes them to be forever with him. 

The dualistic system of the Sankhya 
likewise culminates in a philosophy of 
salvation. Here too the way is knowl- 
edge — knowledge that the true self is 
not what men think, whether they 
identify it with the body or self-con- 
scious mind, but a transcendental Ego, 
essentially inactive and impassive, un- 
touched by all the changes of its environ- 
ment. Sensation, intellection, volition, 
together with the self-consciousness which 
refers these to an Ego, are not functions 
of the soul, but operations of that matter, 
instinct with productive and destructive 
energies, which is the seat and source of 
all change. When the illusion is dispelled 
by which the soul is conceived to be actor 



16 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

or sufferer in the drama of existence, 
it is set free not only from gross embod- 
iment but from the subtle material 
apparatus of sense and consciousness, 
and abides forever an unconcerned 
spectator of a play it does not see — a 
monad Absolute. 

The Yoga, with its physiological and 
psychological methods, has the same 
end, the emancipation of the soul from 
the bondage of rebirth, which is the 
greatest imaginable evil. Ascetics of 
every type — Sannyasins, Yogins, Sa- 
dhus — seek this deliverance in their 
several fashions. Jainism and Bud- 
dhism, rejecting the authority of the 
Vedas and the pretensions of the Brah- 
mans, painted in still darker colors the 
misery of mortal life, and preached 
salvation by the suppression of the 
activity of the soul or by the extinction 
of desire — the will to be. Primitive 
Buddhism, indeed, denied the perma- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 17 

nence of the Ego, and therefore knew no 
transmigration of souls, because in that 
sense there was no soul to migrate from 
body to body; but it claimed as its great 
discovery the " chain of causation " 
which entails rebirth, and to the ordi- 
nary mind, incapable of the psychologi- 
cal subtleties of anegoism, the difference 
from the common belief in metem- 
psychosis was probably more in words 
than in conception. 

The goal is Nirvana. In different 
schools in the course of the centuries 
Nirvana has had many meanings; to 
some it signified the extinction of the 
desire which gives the deed its deadly 
power, and the great release from mortal 
existence; 16 some conceived it positively 
as the supreme good, the transcendent 
intelligence which is the essence of a 
Buddha, or as absolute Being. But al- 
ways it has been the end of the round of 
rebirth. 



1 8 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

The missionary expansion of Bud- 
dhism carried the Indian doctrine of an 
endless series of mortal lives under the 
law of Karma — the inevitable conse- 
quence of the deed done — to Tibet and 
China, to Corea and Japan, as well as to 
Ceylon and Farther India; while along 
the routes of commerce Hinduism 
reached far into the Malayan lands 
where Hindu influence has now been 
superseded by Moslem. The belief in 
rebirth in some form or other pervades 
all Eastern Asia. 

In the Great Vehicle (Mahayana) 
school of Buddhism, which gained 
predominance in China and Japan, re- 
embodiment has acquired another signi- 
ficance. While the old-fashioned saint 
sought only to achieve his own salvation 
and enter at death into the Nirvana 
from which there is no return, the Bo- 
dhisattva aspired in some future age to 
become a Buddha and a saviour of the 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 19 

world, and therefore voluntarily re- 
mained in the round of rebirth when he 
might have escaped from it and entered 
into his rest. In his long succession of 
embodiments, from the time he first con- 
ceived the great purpose, he is cultivat- 
ing the perfections which a Buddha 
must possess, carrying over what he has 
achieved in one existence as a diathesis 
of character into another, until the 
consummation. 

The identity of the individual Bodhi- 
sattva in all these lives is assumed; for 
the original purpose, or vow, runs 
through them all and gives unity to the 
endeavor, and the results of these en- 
deavors are preserved and transmitted 
from life to life; and although even here 
Buddhist psychology does not allow us 
to speak of an individual soul, 17 founding 
its refusal on the metaphysics of unre- 
ality, the less subtle Western mind can 
find no more appropriate name for it. 



20 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

Metempsychosis — using the term with 
the same qualification — here becomes 
a way by which man may progress from 
life to life till he attains perfect intelli- 
gence and a perfection of character in 
which he is not only free from all selfish 
desires and aims, but is filled with pure 
compassion and benevolence. Then, out 
of love to all beings and desire for their 
salvation, he becomes incarnate as the 
Buddha of the age, and reveals the way 
of life. 

Herein the Bodhisattva has a great 
exemplar in Sakyamuni, whose experi- 
ences in many forms of existence before 
he became Buddha were narrated in the 
Jataka-book, and formed the favorite 
subjects of Buddhist art. Other Bud- 
dhas, like Amitabha, had trodden the 
same path to the same end. 

The conception of the progressive 
development of character to perfection 
through many rebirths is common, as we 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 21 

shall see, in modern Western forms of the 
belief; but in the East it is peculiar to 
Mahayana Buddhism. And while in the 
West the perfection of the individual is 
the end in itself, in Buddhism it is a 
means to a greater end — the salvation 
of all sentient beings. 

This rapid survey would be incom- 
plete without at least a mention of the 
Chinese thinker Chuang-tzse, to whose 
philosophy " we are such stuff as 
dreams are made of," and who conceives 
metempsychosis accordingly. In an 
often quoted passage he writes : 

" Once upon a time I dreamt I was a but- 
terfly, fluttering hither and thither. ... I was 
conscious only of following my fancies as a 
butterfly, and was unconscious of my individu- 
ality as a man. Suddenly, I awaked, and there 
I lay, myself again. Now I do not know 
whether I was then a man dreaming I was a 
butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly 
dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a 
butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The 
transition is called metempsychosis." 18 



22 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

Chuang-tzse wrote in the latter part 
of the fourth and the first quarter of the 
third century B.C. In his time Bud- 
dhism had not yet been introduced into 
China, 19 and it is very improbable that 
Chuang-tzse had any knowledge of its 
doctrines. Influence of Indian philos- 
ophy upon the Taoism of Lao-tzse and 
his successors has been conjectured, but 
without sufficient reason. So far as 
Chuang-tzse is concerned, his playful 
treatment of the subject is far removed 
from the Indian seriousness, and of the 
deterministic idea of Karma there is no 
suggestion. Popular Chinese beliefs and 
the principles of his own philosophy are 
quite adequate to account for Chuang- 
tzse's fancy. 

Ill 

The Greeks had all the common varie- 
ties of belief about the whereabouts of 
the departed. Ghosts troubled them as 
much as other people; piety and appre- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 23 

hension conspired to build tombs for 
the dwellings of the dead and to provide 
for their wants; the Homeric Hades 
was a vast cavernous nether-world 
like the Hebrew Sheol, among whose 
pallid shades a later hand painted in 
the torments of Tityos and Sisyphos 
and Tantalos — the beginnings of hell. 20 
Polygnotos depicted for the edification of 
worshippers at Delphi the punishment 
of the Danaidae. Plato and Plutarch, 
Aristophanes and Lucian, in their dif- 
ferent ways let us look into the Greek 
inferno, and we can follow the tradition 
through such writings as the Apoc- 
alypse of Peter into the vision literature 
of the Middle Ages and the Divina 
Commedia of Dante. 

The oldest conception of retribution 
doubtless was that the Erinys, the 
vengeful Fury, pursued the guilty beyond 
the tomb; but the idea of a judgment of 
the dead early appears. Thus Pindar: 



24 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

" At death, forthwith, the helpless souls 
receive their retribution, and deeds done 
in this realm of Zeus are judged beneath 
the earth by one who gives sentence 
with dire necessity." The poet goes on 
to picture the abode of the blest in their 
subterranean world where the 7 sun 
shines by night as brilliant as by day, 
and the toil-free and tearless life of the 
good there in company with the most 
honored gods ; while the others endure a 
misery men cannot bear to look upon. 21 
The Orphic religion, which, from the 
sixth century on, spread widely in Greece 
and had great influence, dwelt with 
evangelistic zeal on the misery of the 
unsanctified in hell; much of the fami- 
liar imagery of later representations can 
be traced to this source. It was, indeed, 
as a way of salvation from this misery 
that the new religion offered itself, with 
its initiations and purifications, its 
orgies and enthusiasms. Through the 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 25 

same Orphic channels, probably, the 
idea of metempsychosis, at least in a 
religious connection, was introduced 
into Greece. The view of the Greeks 
themselves, that Pythagoras, with whose 
name the belief is peculiarly associated, 
appropriated the doctrine from the 
Egyptians 22 must be rejected; for among 
the many and confused notions of the 
ancient Egyptians about the hereafter, 
the transmigration of souls does not 
figure. The premises of the Greek con- 
ception are not to be sought in the mys- 
terious philosophy of Egyptian priests, 
but in a rude popular psychology which 
does not have to be borrowed. The 
belief, it may be observed, is expressly 
attributed to the Thracian Getae, and 
may well have been general among the 
Thracians from whom the Dionysiac- 
Orphic religions spread into Greece. 

The starting point is religious, not 
metaphysical. The soul is a fallen 



26 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

divinity (daimon), for its fault embodied 
upon earth and subject here to physical 
and moral defilement. The body is 
the tomb of the soul, or its prison- 
house, or its transient habitation, its 
tabernacle, or its vesture of flesh, its 
filthy garment — all these figures, so 
familiar in Christian literature, are 
Greek commonplaces. 

From this bondage the soul is freed by 
death only to pass into another body 
of man, or beast, or plant. Pythagoras 
taught that the soul, entering the round 
of necessity, is bound now in one kind of 
living creatures, now in another; 23 and 
Empedocles says of himself : " I was erst- 
while a boy, a girl, a shrub, a bird, a 
speechless fish in the sea. ' ■ 24 Later, when 
psychology discovered a difference of 
kind between men's souls and brutes — 
not to speak of shrubs — the soul's mi- 
grations were confined by some to the 
human genus, though Plato still holds 
the older opinion. 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 27 

Rebirth, as well as the first embodi- 
ment, was expiatory. Pindar speaks 
only vaguely of the " ancient guilt," but 
Empedocles is more explicit: " There is 
an oracle of Necessity, an ancient decree 
of the gods, eternal, sealed with broad 
oaths, that when one of the divine 
beings (Satjuom) who have endless life as 
their lot criminally defiles his hands by 
bloodshed, or when one, in the train of 
Strife, swears a false oath, he must wan- 
der thrice ten thousand seasons far from 
the blessed, being born through all that 
time in all manner of forms of mortal 
creatures, exchanging one grievous path 
of life for another." 25 

In Greece, as in India, the belief in 
metempsychosis was early combined 
with the established notion of retribu- 
tion after death. From their punish- 
ment in the nether-world for deeds done 
in the body or from their reward in the 
abode of the blest, souls are sent back to 



28 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

earth to enter other bodies, returning at 
death again to Hades — thus the round 
goes on. 

It is not, however, as in India, an 
endless round. The guilt of the fall is 
expiated by the soul's banishment, 26 and 
by the sufferings it undergoes in this 
mortal life and beneath the earth its 
defilement is purged; when this has 
been accomplished, the soul is delivered 
from mortality and returns to its original 
estate. The souls whose expiation of the 
ancient guilt Persephone accepts as 
sumcient, she sends back to the light of 
the sun in the ninth year (after their 
descent to Hades); of such are born 
illustrious kings, and men excelling in 
might, and eminent in wisdom. There- 
after they are worshipped as heroes. 27 

It was an early and persistent feature 
of the doctrine that the expiation was 
completed in a certain cycle of rebirths 
recurring at fixed intervals of time. In 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 29 

Pindar, those who thrice, in both states 
(i.e. hi the earthly life and in Hades), have 
persevered to keep the soul wholly free 
from evils traverse the way of Zeus to the 
towers of Kronos, the island of the blest, 
whose delights are poetically described. 28 
The common belief was that a sojourn of 
a thousand years in the abodes of the 
blessed or the dismal realm of Hades in- 
tervened between the successive earthly 
embodiments of the soul, and that the 
whole cycle comprised ten such returns, 
so that, in normal course, the soul 
could attain final release and restoration 
of its divinity only after a lapse of more 
than ten thousand years. 29 This scheme, 
which we shall find again in Plato, is 
probably Pythagorean. 

The guilt which was to be expiated 
was, as in ancient religions generally, 
conceived as defilement, and demanded 
physical or magical purifications. Such 
purifications formed an important part 



30 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

in the ritual of the Orphic and Pythag- 
orean sects; Empedocles was a famous 
expert in the art. 

In the body, the soul is ever beset by 
the temptations of sense and exposed to 
pollution by contact with things unclean. 
Worse still, it is in danger of forgetting 
its origin and destiny, and thus, with no 
effort to escape the round of death and 
birth, contracting fresh guilt in every 
existence, may go on endlessly. The 
task of religion and of philosophy is to 
awake in man the consciousness of his 
true divine nature, to arouse him to a 
sense of his misery and peril, and to show 
him what he must do to be saved. 

The way is the religious, or, as they 
called it, the philosophic, life, a regimen 
by which the accumulation of guilt and 
defilement was guarded against and un- 
cleanness purged. Since the greatest sin 
is the taking of life, it was forbidden to 
eat flesh, or to offer bloody sacrifices to 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 31 

the gods; 30 wine, also, was generally pro- 
scribed; and there were many other > 
taboos, such as the famous rule against 
beans. For the better observance of 
this mode of life, Pythagoras founded in 
southern Italy a religious order, which 
for a time flourished greatly. Similar 
abstinences were practised by the Orphic 
sects and other seekers of salvation. To 
this bodily discipline the Pythagoreans 
added the purification of the soul by 
philosophy, but wherein this consisted is 
beyond our knowledge. 

Thus far the conception of metem- 
psychosis had been that the soul, a 
divine being, had been banished to earth 
for an " ancient guilt," a mythical fall, 
and condemned to alternating sojourns 
in mortal bodies and in Hades; and that 
its release came by expiation and purifi- 
cation through a long period. 

For Plato also the soul is here below 
in consequence of a fall; but it is the fall 




32 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

of the soul itself rather than the trans- 
gression of an eternal statute of the gods. 
In the myth of the charioteer and his pair 
of winged steeds in the Phaedrus, 31 the 
disaster comes from the driver's inability 
to control the unruly beast — that is, the 
failure of the intellectual element in the 
soul to master its lower desires. Plung- 
ing madly downward, the brute drags 
the soul, with broken wings, to earth, 
where it enters a human body, 32 it may be 
of one who becomes a philosopher, or of 
some lower kind of man, according to the 
measure of the vision of truth it had 
caught there above. At death, the souls 
go to judgment, and are sent to places 
of punishment beneath the earth, or are 
borne aloft to a region in the heavens, 
their destiny corresponding to the life 
they lived among men. 

In the thousandth year, the souls from 
above and below come to draw lots and 
elect the life on which they are about 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 33 

to enter. A soul that was once a man's 
may now by its own choice pass into 
a beast, and one that was before in a 
beast may enter the body of a man. 
Ten thousand years must pass in these 
vicissitudes before the soul that has 
lost its wings can have them restored. 
Only the soul that has sincerely pursued 
philosophy and in three successive mil- 
leniums has made the election of the 
philosophic life recovers its wings in the 
third thousandth year, and mounts up 
to the world above whence it came. 33 

The same conceptions recur in the 
most extended of Plato's presentations 
of the state after death, the myth of Er 
the Pamphylian at the end of the Re- 
public. For every wrong men do to any 
one they sutler ten-fold — a thousand 
years, ten times the span of human life. 
Especial emphasis is here laid on the 
freedom of the soul in choosing its life. 
On the eve of its return to earth, each 



34 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

soul elects the kind of life it wishes to 
live, after solemn warning of the respon- 
sibility of the choice: "The word of 
Lachesis, daughter of Necessity! Short- 
lived souls, this is the beginning of a new 
cycle of mortal life and death; your 
genius will not pick you out, but you 
will choose your genius . . . Virtue is 
free to all, and as a man honors or dis- 
esteems it, he will have more or less of it. 
The fault is the chooser's; God is blame- 
less." Having made their choices in the 
memory of their former life, the souls 
drink the water of forgetfulness, and, 
attended by their genii (daimones), as- 
cend to earth. 

The eschatology of Plato is thus a 
combination of metempsychosis with 
retribution in heaven or hell. 34 All the 
elements of this eschatology are found in 
authors much older than Plato, and it is 
well established that the doctrine origi- 
nated and was systematized in Orphic- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 35 

Pythagorean sects or schools, from whom 
Plato appropriated it. 

But under all the similarity of Plato's 
teachings to those of his predecessors, 
lies a different conception of the nature 
of the soul, of its ruin and its restoration. 
For Plato the soul is an immaterial intelli- 
gence, and thus essentially divine; its 
fall is the consequence of an imperfect 
vision of the eternal truth and beauty; 
its purification is not by magical medi- 
cine and dietary laws, but the clarifica- 
tion of the intelligence by philosophy. 

So far as the obscuration is moral, the 
catharsis is moral; not only the truth, 
but temperance and justice and courage 
and sound sense are means of purification. 
Above all, the soul, rising superior to the 
deceptions of the senses and the seduc- 
tions of the appetites, emancipating 
itself from the body, must collect itself, 
and, so far as it can, now and hereafter, 
live by itself. 35 This liberation makes 



36 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

man, even on earth, immortal and divine. 
His flight from the world is the putting 
on of the likeness of God; and when 
such a one is finally released from mortal 
existence, the pure soul ascends to be 
forever with God. 

Plato thus took up into his idealistic 
philosophy the conceptions of the origin 
and destiny of the soul which came ulti- 
mately from the mystery religions, and 
in so doing purified and transfigured 
them. His successors rejected them alto- 
gether. Aristotle's psychology made the 
" active intellect " essentially eternal, 
but admitted no individual existence 
after death; the skepticism of the Mid- 
dle Academy brought the immortality of 
the soul into doubt in Plato's own 
school; the Epicureans took it for their 
mission to free men from the fear of 
death and hell by the knowledge that the 
soul is dissolved with the body; the 
older Stoics in general held that the in- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 37 

dividual soul survived till the next 
universal conflagration, but not that it 
migrated into other bodies; some of the 
teachers of Middle Stoa — notably, Pan- 
aetius — taught that the soul was gener- 
ated with the body and perished with it. 

In the first century before Christ, how- 
ever, in the general revival of religious 
philosophy, there was a revival of the 
doctrine of metempsychosis in more than 
one school (Pythagoreans, Sextians), and 
in the eclectic or syncretistic popular 
philosophies and theologies of the suc- 
ceeding period metempsychosis is a Com- 
mon belief. 

It is found, for instance, in the so- 
called Hermes Trismegistos, with the 
old controversy whether a human soul 
can ever be degraded to existence in the 
body of a beast. The soul (Nous, or 
Logos) is of the same nature with God; 
its descent to the earthly sphere and 
incarceration in a mortal body is brought 



38 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

into connection with a mythical cosmog- 
ony; its transmigrations, its salvation 
by transcendental knowledge (yv&xns), 
and the upward way by which it attains 
to godhead and immortality, are the 
proper subject of these curious scriptures. 
Many Gnostic sects which figure in the 
catalogues of Christian heresies also 
held to metempsychosis. 36 

The doctrine attained its final form in 
ancient philosophy in the Neoplatonic 
system of Plotinus. The mythical vesture 
— - especially the infernal features — is 
here stripped off, and the theory is pre- 
sented in the context of a transcendental 
psychology and as an integral part of an 
imposing metaphysical construction of 
the universe. 

The soul is by nature divine, of the 
same essence with deity; 37 its fall is its 
desire to be something for itself, through 
which it forgets its father, God, and its 
own true nature; rejoicing in the exer- 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 39 

cise of its free-will, it strays so far that it 
loses the consciousness of its origin, " as 
children early torn from their parents 
and brought up for a long time away 
from them do not know either who they 
are or who their parents were." 38 The 
double error of the soul is overvaluing 
earthly things and disprizing itself. 
But if it can be brought to see the worth- 
lessness of the things it esteems above 
itself, and to recognize its origin and 
worth, it has in itself the power of re- 
covery. For, as Plotinus expresses it, 
" our soul did not wholly descend into 
the world of sense, but somewhat of it 
ever abides in the intelligible world." 39 
To that world it may mount up again, 
and dispelling the illusion of the sepa- 
rate self-consciousness, " ceasing to draw 
a line around itself to divide itself from 
universal reality, will come to the abso- 
lute whole, not by advancing some- 
whither, but by abiding in that whereon 
the whole is based." 40 



40 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

But there are heights above even the 
unity of intelligence; above the vision 
of an intelligence that is master of its 
faculties there is the intuition of an in- 
telligence in love. Bereft of its faculties 
by the intoxication of the nectar, " it is 
reduced by love to that simple unity of 
being which is the perfect satisfaction 
of our souls." 41 Of this final state of 
blessedness the soul has a foretaste and 
earnest here in moments of ecstasy. 

In their descent from the intelligible 
world, the souls come first to the heavens, 
and there assume a body, through which 
they pass into more earthy bodies the 
farther they proceed in this downward 
way, and from one body into another, 
these incarnations being retributive; a 
hard master, for example, being born 
to be a slave, one who misused wealth 
born to poverty, and so on. 42 In com- 
passion with the souls suffering such 
hardships, Zeus made their bonds (the 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 41 

body) mortal, and gave them a respite at 
intervals, that they might be free from 
the body, and become themselves, and 
dwell where the soul of the universe ever 
abides, subject to no such vicissitudes. 43 

We have seen how the soul may reas- 
cend to its source; but there is also a 
downward way, in which the soul may 
lose the dim consciousness of its origin 
which man retains, and thus sink to the 
level of the irrational animals or even 
to the purely vegetative life of plants. 44 

The influence of Plotinus was very 
great not only in the Neoplatonic 
school but upon Christian theology, and 
he is the fountain head of the higher 
Christian mysticism. The Bible of the 
mediaeval mystics, Dionysius Areopa- 
gita, 45 is thoroughly Plotinian; the ascent 
of the soul to God and its union with 
God through love — the goal and the 
way — are the same. But the trans- 
migration of souls, which was not an 



42 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

essential part of the Neoplatonic system 
and was, moreover, at variance with the 
doctrine of the Church, was tacitly let 
fall. 

The development of the idea of met- 
empsychosis in India and among the 
Greeks is in many respects similar. 
Thus, to indicate only salient points of 
comparison, in Plotinus, as in the Ve- 
danta, the soul is in essence one with the 
Absolute, from which it is estranged by 
ignorance at once of the Absolute and of 
its own true nature. Alienated thus by a 
separating self-consciousness from its 
real self, the soul is invested with a body, 
and passes from body to body of man or 
beast as its character determines from 
existence to existence. From this condi- 
tion it can be delivered only by true self- 
knowledge. The illusion of the separate 
consciousness is thus dispelled, and in 
sublime intuition the soul realizes its 
oneness with the universal intelligence 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 43 

and universal being, and with the 
Absolute which is beyond knowing and 
being. 

These fundamental agreements, to 
which many resemblances in particulars 
might be added, naturally prompt the 
inquiry whether they are the outcome of 
an independent parallel development, or 
whether the idea of transmigration in 
Greek religions . and philosophies is 
derived from India, or at least influenced 
in its higher development by Indian 
thought. 

Many scholars are convinced that the 
belief in metempsychosis was received by 
the Greeks from India; 46 and some go so 
far as to attribute the introduction of 
the doctrine to Pythagoras, whose travels 
in search of wisdom are for this purpose 
extended to India. 47 The question is but 
a part of a larger problem, the influence 
of India on the West, which lies quite 
beyond the scope of our inquiry. It 



44 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

must suffice here to adduce briefly cer- 
tain considerations bearing on the partic- 
ular subject before us. 

It may be said, to begin with, that 
there is no indication that the Greeks in 
any age entertained a suspicion that the 
doctrine of transmigration was derived 
from India, or, indeed, that they had any 
philosophical debts in that quarter. 
Further, the doctrine appears to have 
been well known in the sixth century, 
and to have been especially current in 
Sicily and southern Italy, while all that 
we know of communication in that age 
makes it improbable that the Greeks had 
such a knowledge of Indian thought as 
the hypothesis implies prior to the con- 
solidation of the Persian empire under 
Darius and the end of the Persian wars. 

Of greater weight than these antece- 
dent probabilities are the far-reaching 
differences between the Greek and Indian 
conceptions of metempsychosis. The 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 45 

Indian conception is inseparable from 
the doctrine of Karma, 48 to which there 
is no parallel among the Greeks. 49 On the 
other hand, the characteristic Greek 
notions of a fall of the soul in time by 
an act of free-will, and of the expiation 
of this original sin and of the actual 
transgressions of earthly lives by a 
limited series of rebirths in a period of 
ten thousand years, are not only foreign 
to Indian thought of every school but 
radically at variance with it. 50 What 
remains is the bare belief in transmigra- 
tion (which, as we have seen, is a com- 
mon piece of savage soul-lore), and the 
moral development of it (also common), 
according to which man's estate and for- 
tune in the mortal embodiment are pre- 
determined by former deeds. 

In Plato, metempsychosis is most 
clearly, even to its mythical form, 
adopted from the Greek mystery reli- 
gions and religious philosophies. What 



46 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

raises it above the level of the vulgar 
beliefs is the mind of Plato himself, his 
own higher theology and anthropology, 
whose antecedents again are well known, 
and are genuinely Greek. 

And now, coming back to Plotinus, in 
whom we found such striking resem- 
blance to the Vedanta, it must be said 
that in his time, as, indeed, ever since the 
conquests of Alexander, communication 
between the West and the East was 
such that knowledge of Indian religions 
and philosophies might very well have 
reached a great commercial and literary 
centre such as Alexandria. How much 
was actually known of them is another 
question; so far as can be judged from 
what remains to us, it was surprisingly 
little. Concerning Plotinus himself, the 
testimony of his disciple Porphyry is, 
that, after attaining proficiency in Greek 
philosophy, he desired to acquaint him- 
self with that of the Persians and the 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 47 

Indians, and to that end accompanied 
the Emperor Gordian on his campaign 
against the Persians. He had got no 
farther than Mesopotamia when Gordian 
was murdered, and Plotinus was lucky to 
get safe back to Antioch. This was as 
near as he came to the sources of Indian 
wisdom. Deussen, than whom no one 
is better qualified to speak, seems to 
me right in the conclusion that " the 
remarkable agreements between Neopla- 
tonic and Indian ideas are to be 
explained solely by essential affinity, 
not by historical dependence." 51 

The system of Plotinus is, as I have 
said elsewhere, " a summation, or rather 
synthesis, of the whole movement of 
Greek metaphysics from the Eleatics 
down, and there is nothing in it that is 
not thus adequately accounted for; while 
the characteristic features of this system 
have no parallel in Indian philosophy " 
— I mean, the theory of emanations by 



48 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

which he endeavors to bridge the im- 
passable gulf between the Absolute and 
a real world, and which, in inverse order, 
are the stages by which the fallen soul 
ascends to God. 

IV 

Primitive Christianity received the 
eschatology of contemporary Palestinian 
Judaism, the general features of which 
were that at death the disembodied 
soul went to an abode of blessedness or a 
prison-house of misery according to its 
desert. In the general resurrection at the 
end of the age the soul would be reunited 
with the body, which to this end would 
be raised from the tomb, and thus man 
would stand at the judgment bar of God 
to receive the final award, a paradise of 
delight for the righteous and a hell of 
fire for the wicked. 52 In this scheme there 
was no room for the migration of the 
soul from one body to another. Some of 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 49 

the Hellenized Jews adopted Platonic 
ideas of pre-existence and immortality, 
and Philo has a doctrine of reincarna- 
tion, different, however, from the com- 
mon notions of metempsychosis. 53 

The resurrection of the body was a 
stumbling-block to all who had a tinc- 
ture of Greek education, not merely 
because the reconstitution of a long-dis- 
sipated body out of its original elements 
was beyond the most elastic imagination 
for the miraculous, but because the re- 
incarceration of the soul in its prison- 
house of flesh — though it were to 
dwell in an earthly or other-earthly 
paradise — was the greatest evil they 
could think of. Paul meets this feeling 
at least half way: the resurrection of the 
body is not a restoration of the old 
material, or animal, body; it is the in- 
vestment of the soul with a new " spirit- 
ual " body, for flesh and blood cannot 
inherit the kingdom of God. 54 



50 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

The Gnostics, with their dualistic 
hostility to matter as inherently evil, 
rejected the resurrection of the body, and 
many of them, as has been said, held to 
the transmigration of souls. 55 Against the 
objections of Gentiles and heretics, 
Christian apologists like Athenagoras 
proved their stalwart faith by amrming 
the resurrection in its most material 
form. The Apostles' Creed makes the 
resurrection of the flesh one of its cardi- 
nal articles; 56 Tertullian gives its sense 
in his uncompromising way when he 
says: " resurget igitur caro, et quidem 
omnis, et quidem ipsa, et quidem integral 01 

The Alexandrian Fathers, following 
Paul, denied the resurrection of the 
flesh; their conception of the immor- 
tality of the soul, like that of their pre- 
cursor, Philo, was essentially Platonic, 
and Origen is accused by Theophilus of 
teaching that the soul was frequently 
re-embodied and repeatedly experienced 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 51 

death. 58 From his own writings, however, 
it appears that, while Origen, in his 
theory of the consummation of being, 
held that the same soul might be 
variously embodied in successive worlds, 
he did not accept metempsychosis in the 
usual meaning of the term. 59 

It has been asserted that the doctrine 
of reincarnation was formally con- 
demned by a Church Council in the 
sixth century, and the inference is drawn 
that prior to that time it had been cur- 
rent and uncondemned in the Church. 60 
The Council referred to leveled its 
anathema, however, not at reincarna- 
tion — of which it makes no mention at 
all — but at the Origenistic heresies of 
the pre-existence of souls and the final 
restoration of all beings (dro/cardo-rao-is). 61 
That individuals here and there held 
Platonic or Neoplatonic conceptions of 
metempsychosis is not remarkable; 62 
but that the belief had any general cur- 



52 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

rency there is neither evidence nor 
probability. 

In the East, where Gnostic sects and 
Gnostic influences obstinately persisted, 
the doctrine of metempsychosis also 
survived. It had a place in the eclectic 
religion of Mani, with a function which 
shows fundamentally Western rather 
than Indian affinities, though Indian 
influence is plainly seen in related parts 
of his system, for instance, in the rules 
(for the Elect) against injuring any liv- 
ing thing, which are carried to as great 
lengths as the principle of Ahimsa in the 
extremest Indian sects. 63 

Among Mohammedans the difficulty 
of reconciling the sufferings of innocent 
children and dumb animals with the 
goodness or even the justice of God led 
some of the liberal theologians (Mu c ta- 
zilites) to seek a solution in sins com- 
mitted in a former existence. The same 
opinion is said to have been entertained 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 53 

by some mediaeval Nestorians. It ap- 
pears also among the Jewish Karaites. 
There was large interchange of ideas 
among these schools or parties, which, 
besides common principles, had a natu- 
ral bond of sympathy in the fact that 
they were all in the like condemnation 
in the eyes of the orthodoxy of their 
several religions. 

Indian, particularly Buddhist, in- 
fluence was also strong in that region and 
time; the Buddhist idea of Nirvana is 
unmistakable in the later Oriental Sufis, 
and similar methods of attainment were 
practised. It may be inferred, therefore, 
that knowledge of Buddhism contributed 
to the currency of the belief in rebirth 
among Oriental Christians and Jews as 
well as Moslems. 

Reincarnation is fundamental to the 
doctrine of the Imam as held by the 
Shi r a Moslems; it was developed in a 
characteristic form by the Isma c ilis, and 



54 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

is a cardinal doctrine of Babism. The 
Druses believe that the souls of the 
righteous (Druses) pass at death into 
progressively more perfect embodiments 
till they reach a stage at which they are 
re-absorbed in the godhead, while the 
wicked are born in lower condition. 
Their teaching allows transmigration 
only within human kind, but the less 
instructed extend it to animals. The 
Nusairis believe that the souls of the 
wicked are born again as animals, accord- 
ing to the kind and degree of their sin 
becoming cats, asses, wolves, and the 
like. 

In the Jewish Kabbala, which has 
preserved so much ancient gnosticism, 
metempsychosis is an essential part of 
the system. The destiny of the soul is 
to return to the Infinite Source from 
which it emanated. 64 This goal can only 
be attained when all the perfections 
that are potential in it are realized; until 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 55 

then it passes from body to body con- 
tinually. According to some of the later 
Kabbalists, this round of rebirth, in 
which the soul of a man may not only be 
incarnated in another human body but 
in that of an animal suitable to its former 
character, will come to an end only 
when the Messiah establishes a new 
moral order. 

Though the philosophical thinkers in 
general combatted the doctrine, some, 
like Abrabanel, adopted the theory of 
metempsychosis; he argues — antici- 
pating a more modern turn of thought 
— that God thus gives another chance to 
the soul of one who, urged by his tem- 
perament, commits a great sin such as 
murder or adultery, or to one who died 
in youth without opportunity to do 
good works. 

In the Middle Ages some heretical 
Christian sects of dualistic principles, 
such as the Kathari, had a dogma of 



56 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

metempsychosis similar to that of the 
Manichaeans and not improbably de- 
rived from them. It reappears in the 
belief of the modern Russian sect of the 
Doukhobors, whether as a survival from 
these mediaeval heresies or derived from 
some more recent source is uncertain 65 

In all these Western survivals or re- 
vivals of the doctrine the influence of the 
later Neoplatonism is evident; only 
sporadically can an Indian (Buddhistic) 
strain be recognized or surmised. The 
re-embodiments are — at least, for those 
who know the origin and destiny of the 
soul — stages of a progressive purifica- 
tion and elevation, through which it re- 
ascends to its divine source. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that 
with the revival of Platonism and 
Plotinianism at the renaissance, the 
theory of metempsychosis was revived 
in European philosophy. Cosimo de' Me- 
dici's Florentine Academy was founded 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 57 

to cultivate and expound the philosophy 
of Plato; Marsilio Ficino translated not 
only Plato but Plotinus and the so-called 
Hermes Trismegistos, and wrote a trea- 
tise on the Platonic doctrine of immor- 
tality. From Plotinus, and from the 
Kabbala (which had for him as for many 
Christian scholars in the following cen- 
turies a singular fascination), Giordano 
Bruno derived the theory of transmigra- 
tion which he expounds in various places 
in his writings, especially in that entitled 
" De gli heroici furori," which — it is of 
interest to us to note — was dedicated to 
Sir Philip Sidney. 66 



Lessing's conception of history, and 
especially the history of religion, as a 
divine education, by which, from ele- 
mentary beginnings, mankind is led on 
stage by stage toward the perfection 
which is the goal of God's ways with 



58 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

men, had for a corollary that the indi- 
vidual must traverse from end to end the 
same path by which the race achieves its 
destiny. It is inconceivable that this 
should be accomplished within the 
limits of a single lif e — that a soul should 
be in the same existence upon the stage 
of the Old Testament religion, and of 
Christianity, and of that new eternal 
gospel that lies beyond them both. 

But why may not every man have 
been in this world more than once ? Is 
this hypothesis so absurd because it is 
the oldest; because the human mind, 
before it was dissipated and weakened 
by the sophistries of the school, at once 
came upon it ? Why should I not in a 
former existence have progressed toward 
my perfection as far as mere temporal 
punishments and rewards can bring a 
man ? And why not, in another, have 
made all the progress which the prospect 
of eternal rewards so powerfully furthers? 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 59 

Why should I not come again as often as 
I am sent to gain new knowledge, new 
abilities ? Do I carry away so much 
from a single life that it is not worth 
while to return ? 67 

These paragraphs furnished Herder 
the text for an essay, " Palingenesie. Vom 
Wiederkommen menschlicher Seelen." 68 
Herder discusses the origin of the belief 
in transmigration, which he rightly finds, 
not in speculation, but in savage psy- 
chology; it is a " Wahn sinnlicher Men- 
schen." In the form in which it was 
developed by the Brahmans in India — 
the doctrine of a retributive metem- 
psychosis, according to which the mis- 
deeds of one life are expiated in another 
embodiment — Herder emphatically re- 
jects it: Why does this unhappy man 
sutler, without knowing for what he 
suffers ? If we consider it from a moral 
point of view, the expiation is extreme: 
one who is no longer a man suffers for 



60 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

what he did when a man, in a condition 
which deprives him of all capacity of 
moral action, that is, of amendment and 
atonement. On the other hand, morality 
out of consideration, how slight the 
expiation! He who was once a tiger in 
human form is now a real tiger, without 
obligation or conscience, which formerly 
sometimes troubled him. . . . Instead 
of being' punished, he is rewarded; he is 
now wttat he wished to be and in his 
human form could only be imperfectly. 
The considerations which inclined 
Lessing to the hypothesis do not con- 
vince Herder. The solution it offers of 
the suffering of the wretched, the de- 
formed, the oppressed, does not really 
solve the problem; it assumes a destiny 
or a deity that robs a man of the enjoy- 
ment of this life for the transgressions of 
a former life; and since the victim is 
unconscious of his fault, the infliction 
can have no rational or moral end of 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 61 

discipline — it is mere vengeance, and a 
deity which avenges wrong-doing with- 
out seeking to make the wrong-doer 
better is an impossible idea. 

To know what is essential to the hap- 
piness of mankind in particular and in 
general, we do not need to have been 
repeatedly on this earth ; and if we have 
in one life neglected to learn it, we 
should probably neglect it in many. It 
is not more knowledge that is of chief 
importance, but character; and character 
is possible in all ages and conditions. 
There have always been great and good 
men, and we also can be such; this is the 
task that is set us in this, the only life we 
know — to achieve a good character. It 
is a" Palingenesia, a rebirth of ideals and 
motives, in this life that is needful. 

Lessing conceived of reincarnation as 
a way by which a human soul might 
advance stage by stage in knowledge and 
virtue to perfection, repeating in itself 



62 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

the progress of the race in its divine 
education. An older contemporary of 
Lessing's, the Swiss naturalist Charles 
Bonnet, while expressly repudiating the 
Pythagorean doctrine of metempsy- 
chosis — which he believed to come 
ultimately from India — developed in 
detail the hypothesis that the souls of 
the lower animals survive, and are suc- 
cessively re-embodied in animals of 
higher rank in the scale of classification 
until they arrive at the perfection of 
human souls. 69 Charles Fourier worked 
transmigration, in peculiar form, into 
his fantastic scheme of social and 
economic progress. 70 

Louis Figuier, in " Le lendemain de la 
mort, ou la vie future selon la science/' 
not only repeated the ancient arguments 
— reincarnation is the only explanation 
of the presence of man on the earth, of 
the sad and unequal conditions of human 
life, of the fate of children dying in 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 63 

infancy, etc., — and extended it, like 
Bonnet, into natural history, the scale 
of animal types being steps in the ascent 
of souls — the soul of a zoophyte or a 
mollusc, for example, being promoted to 
an articulate — but introduces it into 
astronomy and astrophysics, reviving 
thus, in modern scientific guise, ancient 
Greek adventures. The sun is the abode 
of purely spiritual beings; its rays are 
emanations (souls) perpetually sent out 
by the sun through space to the earth or 
the planets; the sun's heat is kept up, 
not, as some astronomers have conjec- 
tured, by a bombardment of asteroids, 
but by the return of souls, ardent and 
pure spirits, continually replacing those 
which are emanated from it. 

In the revival of the theory of metem- 
psychosis in the nineteenth century, the 
influence of Indian thought had a con- 
siderable part. The Bhagavad-gita was 
Englished by Wilkins in 1785; in 1801 



64 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

Anquetil Duperron published a Latin 
translation of a modern Persian version 
of the Upanishads made at the instance 
of the Mogul Emperor and eclectic 
theologian, Akbar. The impression 
which the Upanishads in Duperron's 
translation made upon Schopenhauer is 
well known. Other translations of phil- 
osophical and religious texts followed in 
rapid succession, until the greater part of 
this literature has been rendered into 
the languages of modern Europe. The 
philosophical systems of India have been 
interpreted by a succession of illustrious 
scholars from Colebrooke's day to our 
own; the Upanishads and the Vedanta, 
in particular, have been studied with 
increasing insight and appreciation. In- 
terest in Indian thought has been stimu- 
lated by popular literature; societies for 
the study of the Vedanta under the 
guidance of native teachers have been 
formed; texts have been translated and 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 65 

expositions published by Hindu scholars 
for Western readers; a kind of mission- 
ary propaganda has been carried on both 
in Europe and America. " Theosophy," 
also, with its travesty of Indian ideas, 
has contributed to make transmigration 
familiar. 

The modern variations of the doctrine 
of metempsychosis, both such as have 
arisen in the West and those in which 
Indian thought is modernized and ac- 
comodated to Western modes of thought, 
differ from the classical types by intro- 
ducing the idea of evolution, and often 
endeavor to establish the theory on a 
scientific basis. The successive rein- 
carnations are stages in the soul's prog- 
ress toward perfection; the series is 
sometimes extended from the lowest 
animate forms upward to man; others, 
as we have seen, connect it with theories 
of social and economic development, or 
with physical hypotheses. 



66 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

However natural such a way of con- 
ceiving the subject may be to our evolu- 
tionary habit of mind, it is entirely 
foreign to the thought of the ancients in 
the East or West. 71 In all the ancient 
theories of metempsychosis the soul is by 
origin and nature divine, eternal, co-essen- 
tial with the Absolute or identical with it. 
From this high estate it fell by its own 
fault, or from this unity it is separated by 
ignorance of itself and of the Absolute, 
and is in consequence imprisoned in a 
mortal body and destined after death 
to be re-embodied until its guilt be 
expiated or its ignorance dispelled by the 
supreme knowledge. Its goal is the 
recovery of its lost estate, the return to 
its source; " the end is, not to be sinless, 
but to be God." 72 

Metempsychosis among the Greeks 
was in the beginning an expiation of 
guilt, and the conception of a fall of the 
soul, moral or intellectual, persists in the 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 67 

more speculative systems. In India it is 
the inexorable law of cause and effect, 
the deed and its consequence, which pur- 
sues man from existence to existence. 
It had no beginning in time, and has no 
end but by the attainment of the tran- 
scendental knowledge the possession of 
which is to be the Absolute. 73 

The biological evolution of souls from 
some primitive psychic cell to the fullness 
of humanity or of divinity, as some of our 
contemporaries imagine it, is a new 
hypothesis, which owes more to the 
century of Darwin than to the philoso- 
phies of Greece or India. 

VI 

A theory which has been embraced by so 
large a part of mankind, of many races 
and religions, and has commended itself 
to some of the most profound thinkers 
of all time, cannot be lightly dismissed. 
In its classic forms, as we have seen, 



68 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

the soul is in essence eternal and un- 
changeable; it does not originate in 
time, either by creation or by propaga- 
tion; consequently the difficulty of 
conceiving how what has a genesis in 
time can be exempt from dissolution in 
time does not arise. 74 

The hypothesis offers an explanation 
of the inequalities among men in mental 
and moral capacity and predisposition, 
as well as in soundness and health of 
body and station and fortune in life. In 
these things there is nothing arbitrary 
and nothing accidental; everything is 
the determinate consequence of former 
acts, thoughts, volitions, and desires, or 
of the totality of character. It is a kind of 
doctrine of heredity; only, a man does 
not inherit from his ancestors, but from 
himself in a former existence; to speak 
in a paradox, his parents are a part of his 
inheritance. 

If this determination of a man's lot by 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 69 

his deeds be regarded from the point of 
view of retribution, it seems to be in 
kind and measure more equitable than 
the incommensurate doctrine of endless 
punishment in hell for the wrong-doing 
of a brief human life. 

If man's earthly existence be con- 
ceived as a probation, it must be admit- 
ted that in any one life men are put 
upon this probation under very unequal 
conditions of every kind, and that the 
theory of a series of embodiments in 
which the soul is tested under various 
conditions accords better with our no- 
tions of justice in the order of things. 

Finally, if an end of perfection is set 
for the soul, metempsychosis affords the 
opportunity for a progressive approach 
to that infinite attainment, whether the 
latter be a return to an initial state 
from which the soul in some way lapsed, 
or the development of the souPs latent 
potentialities. 



70 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

The objection was long ago urged by- 
Epicurus against the Pythagorean doc- 
trine, that, inasmuch as the soul has no 
memory of former existences, and there 
is no conscious personal identity running 
through the series of rebirths, the conse- 
quences fall virtually upon another, who^ 
knows not the cause, and cannot be 
made wiser or better by the punishment 
he bears. 75 

Similarly, if we think of the reincar- 
nations as probationary, the soul carries 
over no experience from one to another, 
and there is thus no cumulative profit 
from the experience of former probations. 
And, considered as development, the 
soul begins each new stage, not where it 
left off in the last life, but, so far as con- 
sciousness goes, starts de novo; it is as 
if, at the several stages of one life-time, 
all memory of what went before should 
be obliterated, so that the grown man 
had no knowledge of himself as a youth, 



METEMPSYCHOSIS ^7 1 

and consequently no light from his earlier 
experience. 

To this objection various answers have 
been made by defenders of the doctrine. 
Perhaps a better one may be offered by 
recent theories of the unconscious and 
the subconscious. From these premises 
it might be admitted that the memory 
of former existences does not emerge in 
normal consciousness, and yet affirmed 
that in the subconscious region of the 
mind there is not only a continuity but 
an organized memory of former experi- 
ences. But, granting all that can be 
said for this hypothesis, it remains that 
there is no intelligence in the sub- 
liminal realm, and no moral quality; 
and consequently the only conditions 
under which we can conceive of intel- 
lectual and moral progress or recovery 
from life to life are lacking. 

This objection applies with peculiar 
force to the modern rationalizations of 



72 METEMPSYCHOSIS 

the belief in reincarnation which en- 
deavor to give it the semblance of a 
scientific hypothesis; for they, by their 
very profession, take it upon them 
to prove the theory reasonable. The 
genuine doctrine has never been con- 
cerned to demonstrate itself to the 
finite understanding; it finds its au- 
thority in revelation, its verification in 
ecstatic experience; and in this higher 
assurance needs not be troubled by 
what, from its point of view, are ration- 
alistic cavils. Its philosophy is an 
ontology which is above reason, incom- 
prehensible, and apprehensible only by 
intuition. 

In this system reincarnation has a 
logical place; the attempt to substitute 
biological analogies for the metaphysical 
foundation is a relapse into the crude 
physiological psychology which Indian 
and Greek thought overcame. 'Metem- 
psychosis without its absolute origin 



METEMPSYCHOSIS 73 

and its transcendent goal is a pseudo- 
scientific hypothesis which has neither 
philosophic meaning nor religious worth. 
It seems often to be inspired by that 
lust of life in which the thinkers of India 
discovered the root of death — of innum- 
erable deaths. 76 To those whose belief 
in reincarnation is animated by such 
desires, the wise will be inclined to 
address the words of Aeneas, when in his 
visit to the nether- world he saw a troop 
of souls about to ascend to earth and be 
re-embodied: 

" O pater, anne aliquas ad caelum hinc 

ire putandum est 
Sublimas animas, iterumque in tarda 

reverti 
Corpora ? Quae lucis miseris tarn dira 

cupido ? " 



NOTES 



NOTES 

i. Merejui/'uxwffts is the commonest Greek word 
for the transmigration of souls. Other terms are 
irakLyyevevla (said by Servius to be Pythagoras' 
word), fxerev ceo /jlcltomtls, and per ay yields. These 
are employed without any difference of meaning, 
as are the modern equivalents, re-embodiment, re- 
incarnation, rebirth, etc. 

2. Manu, xii, 59 ff. 

3. Ibid., v, 38. 

4. Ibid., xi, 53. — Their suffering shows that 
they were sinners, and therefore to be shunned. 

5. Timaeus, oof.; Phaedo, 81 f. An allegorical 
interpretation was given to these passages by later 
Platonists. 

6. Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, iii, 2, 13. 

7. I. e., the law of the act and its consequence. 

8. Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, iv, 4, 5. 

9. This implication is contested by Windisch. 

10. Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, iv, 2, 3. 

11. Chandogya-Upanishad, v, 10, 7. — ■ 

12. Kaushitaki-Upanishad, 1, 2. Deussen, 
Sechzig Upanishads, 2 ed., p. 24. 

77 



78 NOTES 

13. The Maitrayana-Upanishad, in which 
this disgust is strongly expressed (i, 3), is post- 
Buddhistic. The pessimism of Kathaka-Upanishad, 
i, 26 f ., is comparatively mild. The Sankhya philos- 
ophy, and Jainism and Buddhism under its in- 
fluence, are much more deeply pessimistic. There 
is a similar difference between Neoplatonism and 
Gnosticism or Manichaeism. 

14. Neti,neti. Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, ii, 
3, 6; in, 9, 26, etc. 

15. Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, iv, 4, 6 f. 

16. Whether there is an immortal existence be- 
yond for the saint who has attained Nirvana, is a 
question to which Buddha gave no answer. 

17. To be strictly accurate, we should say, the 
psychology of the most influential schools. 

18. Giles's translation. 

19. The traditional date is 55 B.C. (return of 
Ming-ti's envoys); but there is reason to think 
that the Chinese had come into contact with Bud- 
dhism as early as the second century B.C. 

20. Odyssey, xi. These additions to the Nekyia 
are of Orphic origin. 

- 21. Olymp. 2, 56 ff. Pindar is here, as well as in 
the Threnos (Frg. 133) quoted below, drawing on 
the teaching of Sicilian mysteries. Compare also 
Frg. 129-130, 131, 132. 



NOTES 79 

s 22. Herodotus, ii, 123. The Egyptian belief , as 
Herodotus reports it, was that the soul of man is 
immortal, and when the body dies passes into 
another animal; only after it has been successively 
embodied in all kinds of land animals and fishes 
and birds does it again enter a human body; the 
round consumes three thousand years. No trace of 
such a doctrine has been found in Egyptian 
sources, though it is not difficult to explain the 
misunderstanding. 

23. A familiar presentation of the Pythagorean 
doctrine is Ovid, Metamorphoses, xv, 153 ff. 

24. Frg. 117 Diels. The memory of such trans- 
migrations was exceptional. Besides Empedocles, 
the soul of Pythagoras had received from Hermes 
the gift of remembering all the plants and animals 
into which it had come. The same power was pos- 
sessed by Apollonius of Tyana. These reminis- 
cences provoke the scoffs of Xenophanes (Diog. 
Laert. viii, 36) and Lucian (Gallus, c. 18 f.). 

- 25. Frg. 115 Diels. 

26. As in ancient Greek law blood-guilt was 
expiated by the exile of the man-slayer for a term 
of years. 
"27. Pindar, Frg. 133. — Heroes are divine. 

28. Olymp. 2, 75 fL 

29. The " thrice ten thousand seasons " of 



80 NOTES 

Empedocles make ten thousand years, each year 
in the old calendar having three seasons. 

30. Parcite, vaticinor, cognatas caede nefanda 
Exturbare animas, nee sanguine sanguis alatur. — 
Ovid, Metam. xv, 174 f. 

How strict a vegetarian Pythagoras was, was 
disputed in antiquity. See Diels, Fragmente der 
Vorsokratiker, 3 i, 31. 

31. Phaedrus, 246 ff. 

32. Never, in this first embodiment, a lower 
animal. 

33. The three choices of the philosophic life cor- 
respond to the three periods in which the soul keeps 
itself from all evil in Pindar (above, p. 29). 

34. Besides the passages in the Phaedrus and 
the Republic, reference should be made to Gorgias, 
523 ff., and Phaedo, 109 ff . ; to which may be added 
Axiochus, 371 (not by Plato). The speculations of 
the Timaeus are of a different order. 

35. Phaedo, 67, c-d. 

36. Cerinthus, the Carpocratians, Basilidians, 
and others. 

37. 'O/zooucuos. Plotinus, Enn. iv, 7, 5; it is a 
divine thing, from the realms above (iv, 8, 5, etc.). 
Concerning the descent of the soul Plotinus finds 
Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Plato in accord (Ibid.) . 

38. Enn. v, 1, 1. 



NOTES 81 

39. Enn. iv, 8, 8; cf. iv, 3, 12; " souls are not 
cut off from their origin and the Nous." 

40. Enn. vi, 5, 7. See E. Caird, Evolution of 
Theology in the Greek Philosophers, ii, 295 ff. 

41. Enn. vi, 7, 35. Caird, op. cit. p. 300. The 
pregnant Greek is ci7rXco0€ts eh evira.6ei.av t$ Kopq. 

42. Enn. iii, 2, 13. 

43. Enn. iv, 3, 12. 

44. The successors of Plotinus (Porphyry, Iam- 
blichus) confine transmigration to human bodies. 

45. Written probably about 500 a.d. The in- 
fluence of these writings was not confined to those 

>whom we call the mystics; the great scholastics of 
the East and the West are no less in debt to them. 

46. Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, Barthelemy 
Saint-Hilaire, L. v. Schroeder; see Garbe, Sam- 
khya-Philosophie, 90 ff. 

47. Especially L. v. Schroeder, Pythagoras und 
die Inder. 

48. See above, pp. 10 f.. 

49. The deterministic principle, avayicr}, cor- 
responds only in determinism. 

50. In India the fatal ignorance and the incar- 
nation of which it is the cause have neither begin- 
ning nor end; it is not a finite guilt that can be 
expiated. 

51. Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Phil- 
osophic, ii, 1, p. 485. 



82 NOTES 

52. These beliefs are similar to those of the Per- 
sian religion, and not independent of the latter. 

53. De somniis, i, § 138 f. (p. 641 f., Mangey). 

54. I Cor. 15; cf . II Cor. 5. 

55. Tertullian combats this doctrine both in the 
Greek philosophers and in the Gnostics who 
adopted it from them; see De anima, cc. 28 ff., 

34 ff. 

56. 'ApaoTcurts rrjs cap/cos, resurrectio carnis. 

57. This material identity was necessary to jus- 
tice: soul and body which sinned together are 
punished together. 

58. See Jerome, Ep. 98, 10 f. 

59. De principiis, i, 6, 1 ff.; iii, 5, 6; iii, 6, 6; cf. 
ii, 9, 6; i, 7; Contra Celsum, iv, 83. 

60. So, e. g., Abhedananda, Vedanta Philos- 
ophy. Three Lectures (1899); Orlando Smith, 
Eternalism (1902). 

61. Mansi, ix, 395; cf. Hefele, Concilien-Ge- 
schichte, ii, 772. 

62. e. g. Nemesius, De natura hominis, who 
agrees with Porphyry and Iamblichus that human 
souls migrate only into human bodies. 

63. Acta Archelai. 

64. Zohar ii, 99 b, quoted in Jewish Encyclo- 
pedia, xii, 232. 

65. I am indebted for information about the 
Doukhobors to Professor Aurelio Palmieri. 



NOTES 83 

66. De gli heroici furori, pp. 618 ff., 661 ff.; cf. 
Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo, pp. 585 ff., 589 (ed. 
Lagarde, 1888). Plotinus is the chief authority. 

67. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts 
(1780), §§ 93 ff.; cf. Lessings Leben und Nachlass, 
Th. 2, p. 77- 

68. Zerstreute Blatter, Sechste Sammlung, 1797. 
(Ed. Suphan, xvi, 341 ff.) This essay, with two 
others on kindred subjects, was translated by 
F. H. Hedge in 1848. 

69. Palingenesie philosophique, 1769. 

70. Theorie de F unite universelle, 1822. Part of 
this work was translated by Arthur Brisbane. 
(New York, n.d.) 

71. The stages in the re-ascent of the soul to its 
source — in Plotinus, for example — are, it need 
hardly be said, a very different thing from an 
evolution. 

72. Plotinus. 

73. In some of the Hindu religions the deliver- 
ance is wrought by the grace of God for those who 
trust and love him. 

74. That the pre-existence of souls is the neces- 
sary corollary of their immortality has been ap- 
parent to many, apart from the hypothesis of 
transmigration. 

75. Plato seeks to uvoid the apparent injustice 



84 NOTES 

of this by letting the souls choose their lot. See 
above, pp. 35 f. 

76. This lust for the life of the senses expresses 
itself in peculiarly crass form in Fourier, op. cit. y iii, 
304 ff- 



PRINTED AT 

THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.. U.S.A. 



